


Newton Knows Best

by unknowableroom_archivist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Humor, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-11-26
Updated: 2006-05-24
Packaged: 2019-01-19 18:42:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12415776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unknowableroom_archivist/pseuds/unknowableroom_archivist
Summary: Lily and James learn Newton's Laws of Motion first hand. One Book in Motion tends to prevent two Objects Not in Motion from snogging in the stairwell...One chapter for each law. Enjoy!





	1. The First Law

**Author's Note:**

> Note from ChristyCorr, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Unknowable Room](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Unknowable_Room), a Harry Potter archive active from 2005-2016. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after May 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Unknowable Room collection profile](http://www.archiveofourown.org/collections/unknowableroom).

**_'Allo all! This is a short little chapter story, incorporating Newton's three laws of motion, one chapter for each law.._ **

**_Which means it will be only three chapters long. It's just a matter of writing the other two now._ **

**_Read and review, minions!_ **

**_-h_ **

**_Disclaimer:_** A Writer in Denial tends to Stay in Denial unless forced to write a Disclaimer. Don't own it.

Newton Knows Best Chapter One:

The First Law

Lily Evans was pissed off.

Royally.

She sat at her desk in Potions and stared straight ahead, gripping her quill so tightly that it was very much on the verge of snapping. Her hands were shaking violently, and the ink in her quill was slowly creating a large black blot on her perfectly organized potions notes as the sharp tip steadily scratched a hole through the thick paper. Blood was rushing to her face so that it was very close to matching her hair, and she was sure that if she did not get out of that classroom soon she would be spending more time in detention than Sirius Black spent on his hair.

And that was saying something.

_He_ began speaking again, and her blazing green orbs snapped up from boring into the rough wood of the desk in front of her of her and fixate on the back of his despicable, ridiculously unfair, bald head. It took all the willpower she kept on tap to restrain herself from chucking her cauldron full of _perfectly brewed_ potion at him and hoping to high Hogsmeade that the impact would knock him out.

And cause him to sprout numerous, painful, puss-filled boils.

And make him think he was a woman for awhile due to his addled brains.

And, after the fact, make him remember that he was not, in reality, a woman, but still know that for awhile there he was firmly convinced he was.

And make him nullify the detention.

Yes, he didn’t have to do any of those other things as long as he nullified the detention.

Really, she thought she might not have been so able to restrain herself if it were not for the particular potion they had been brewing that day. It was Amortentia, love potion, expertly brewed by herself, and she had more than full confidence that it was perfectly done and extremely effective. Thus her hesitation to chuck across the room. It was most definitely ‘O’ work, and she really didn’t fancy _him_ fawning all over her until the effects wore off.

The thought made her shudder.

“It generally isn’t a good sign when one’s whole body begins shaking in anger. High blood pressure, you know. You might have a stroke or something. And I, personally, would be highly devastated if you fell into an anger-induced coma.”�

_That_ particular voice whispering in her ear didn’t do anything whatsoever to quell her anger, either. She didn’t trust herself not to speak below 282.7 decibels at that particular moment in time, so she merely gripped her quill harder and kept staring straight ahead, looking for all the world as if she were merely attempting to master the impossible task of shooting the Avada Kedavra curse out of her eyes to strike the man lecturing from the front of the dungeon.

“I think you’re wearing a hole in your desk. I would stop if I were you. They give detentions for destruction of school property, I should know.”�

She ignored the persistent voice whispering softly in her left ear and scooted over slightly in her seat to distance herself from the speaker.

It didn’t work.

“You’re going to snap that thing if you don’t stop white-knuckling it. It would be a shame, really. Very nice quill you have there.”�

She made no response except to take a deep breath in an attempt to control herself and not attack the voice with a vengeance worthy of a Hippogriff who’s been told the former half of its name is quite the excellent description of its hindquarters.

“Yes, deep breaths might help. Though I’ve always thought a nice broom ride does the trick best. You could try counting backwards from twenty, I guess, if you’re not one for flying.”�

The quill snapped, and so did Lily. She whipped around to face the speaker, her eyes flashing dangerously and her hair fanning around her face in a wreath of wrathful flames.

It was, in most people’s opinions, quite the frightening picture.

“JAMES POTTER! If you don’t shut up, I’m going to stick this quill up your-“

Luckily, the bell rang just at this moment, and many the innocent ear was saved from forceful loss of naÃ¯vete when her voice was drowned out by the noise of a restless Potions class scrambling to leave a dark and oppressive Dungeon.

“You should’ve tried counting backwards from twenty.”�

Lily stood up, breathing heavily and gripping fiercely in her hand her snapped quill, which was now leaking black ink into the crevasses of her palm. James Potter sat before her, smiling innocently and holding out a quill towards her.

“I told you you were going to snap it. It’s alright though, I have one you can borrow.”� He gestured towards her with the hand holding the quill, the wispy feathers protruding from the stiff shaft fluttering slightly from the movement.

She opened her mouth to retort, and was cut off by _him_.

“Miss Evans, I will be expecting you here at 8 p.m. sharp tonight to serve your detention. We will discuss the nature of your next detention at that time.”�

Lily whipped around to face the original object of her mighty rage, Professor Splintertoe.

“My next detention!”� she exclaimed, “What for?”�

Professor Splintertoe raised an eyebrow, “For the use of foul language in my classroom. Professor Slughorn may not be present today, Miss Evans, but that is hardly reason for you to neglect the rules. Cursing is not permitted. I expected you to know such things, I’m sure you’ve memorized the rule book back to front.”�

Lily turned back to her desk and slammed her books roughly into her school bag. She hauled the bag onto her shoulder, shoved past an amused looking James, and stalked towards the stone archway leading away from the dungeons.

It was bad enough that he had given her a detention for dropping a vile of dragon’s blood _on accident_. Now, he was giving her a detention for saying a word that no one had heard in the first place.

Lily Evans took her perfect record seriously. She had never before received a detention until that moment, and she was _not_ happy about it.

You could tell by the way she was trying to pound the floor to a pulp under her feet.

“8 p.m!”� Professor Splintertoe called to her retreating back, his exclamation reverberating off the hard stone walls around her and mocking her with its repetition.

Lily gripped her snapped quill harder and sped up, stalking towards the Front Hall, her robes whipping about behind her.

If she weren’t so angry, she would have noticed the fearful looks directed her way by the lesser years as they scuttled away from her and pulled less observant friends out of her path by their collars.

An object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force: Newton’s First Law of Motion.

Lily Evans was a prime example of the proverbial ‘Object.’

It appeared that no one was too keen on representing the ‘Outside Force.’

Except for one…

“Evans!”� it yelled, “Hey Evans!”�

She closed her eyes and kept stomping.

“Evans! Wait up!”� it yelled.

She stomped faster in an attempt to get rid of him and keep that empty cell in Azkaban devoid of a redhead for just a little longer.

But James Potter was not easily gotten rid of.

“Aw, come on Lilo,”� he said once he had caught up with her, “It’s only a detention.”�

The Object in Motion stayed in motion.

“Two detentions, Potter,”� corrected the Object, “Two _undeserved_ detentions. And don’t call me Lilo.”�

They passed Professor Slughorn’s closed office door, and Lily shoved back a tapestry to reveal a very narrow staircase. She began stomping up that very narrow staircase as if it had done her a great wrongdoing. 

The Outside Force followed her.

“Well, two detentions aren’t so bad,”� it said reasonably, “I’ve had loads more than that.”�

Lily snorted and kept on stomping, “Yes well, that’s because you’re a _Marauder_ , isn’t it? You just _can’t_ avoid breaking every rule in the book, and _you’re_ detentions are deserved! _Mine_ , however, are no-ARGH!”�

Enter the Outside Force.

Only it turned out not to be James.

Lily Evans had just stomped directly into the trick stair halfway up the very narrow staircase, and her leg was now sufficiently buried in it up to her thigh. The broken quill had flown out of her ink-stained hand and landed a few stairs up, and her book bag had flown off her shoulder and spilled its contents haphazardly over the stairs around her.

James came to a halt behind her.

Two Objects in Motion tend to stay in motion unless acted upon by an Outside Stair…

The parchment she had used that day to copy down the ingredients for the Amortentia potion fluttered down to rest on the stair in front of Lily, face-side up, her own loopy handwriting staring up at her in mockery. She closed her eyes and counted to twenty.

“Need some help?”�

Her eyes snapped open and she twisted her upper body to face James. She gave him her best eat-Dungbombs-and-die look.

“No,”� she snapped, and she turned back around, braced her hands on the stair in front of her, and tugged on her leg with all her might. It didn’t move.

“Are you _sure_ you don’t need any help?”�

She threw her head back towards the ceiling in exasperation, “Yes, Potter! I’m sure!”�

She braced her hands again and shoved on the stair. Her leg sunk lower. She screamed and threw the nearest book up the stairs. 

(The book happened to be _Advanced Potions_ , so it did give her a little satisfaction.)

“You need to work on your anger management skills, Lilo,”� said James.

“Don’t. Call. Me. _LILO_!”� she gritted out, tugging futilely on her buried leg grinding her teeth in frustration.

James ignored her and stepped over her head to walk up the stairs.

“Alright, then. See you around, Evans.”�

Lily stared after him with a panicked expression adorning her face, her eyes widening as he reached the top of the stairs and pulled back the tapestry concealing the staircase from the view of the hall beyond. She seemed to be battling within herself, one part of her saying to save her pride and the other part saying to get her bloody leg out of the bloody stair as soon as bloody possible.

The latter part won.

She was a sensible girl, was Lily.

“Potter! Wait!”�

James turned around and smirked at her, “Yes, Lilykins?”�

She restrained herself from telling him _not_ to call her Lilykins, and instead plucked up enough willpower to ask, “Can you help me?”� in the most polite voice she could muster.

Which wasn’t remotely polite.

James’ smirk grew wider, “Help you with what, Lilykins?”� he asked innocently.

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes briefly; she knew he was doing this to her, irking her, on purpose.

“Can you help me get out of the stair,”� she said, still in her not-so-polite voice.

James cocked his head to the side and trilled, “What’s the magic woooorrrrd?”�

Lily glared at him.

“Please,”� she ground out.

“Certainly!”� James exclaimed, and he bounced down the stairs towards her.

Lily rolled her eyes and scoffed.

One Object Not in Motion tends to stay not in motion unless acted upon by a Previous Object in Motion…

“Thanks,”� she muttered as he reached the stair above her and looked down.

He beamed at her and held out his hands, “Not a problem. Grab my hands.”�

She didn’t move.

“Now Lilo, how can I help you out of the stair if you don’t grab my hands?”� He sounded amused.

She looked up at him. Grabbing his hands would be a bad idea. A very bad idea. Not a good idea. A bad idea.

Bad.

Awful, dreadful, horrific, terrible, ghastly, atrocious, horrendous.

Bad.

To be exact.

The good little voices in her head were telling her so. They were telling her that she had always avoided close proximity, let alone physical contact, with one James Potter, and that she shouldn’t start now.

James quirked an eyebrow, and a new, bad little voice entered her head and told her that he had a very cute eyebrow and that it wanted a better look at that very same cute ebony eyebrow.

The bad voice beat the good voices to a pulp, and she reached out her hands.

She briefly wondered if it was strange to think someone’s eyebrow was cute and that if she would be considered schizophrenic for listening to the ‘bad voices’… but then he grabbed her hands.

They were warm, and they were calloused from Quidditch, they were sending shocks down her arms, and they were causing her legs to turn to jelly.

Though that possibly had something to do with the fact that her legs were in generally odd positions.

But possibly not.

She decided she liked his hands even better than his cute ebony eyebrow.

Or rather, the bad little voice told her that she liked them better than his cute ebony eyebrow.

But that amounted to the same thing.

Which was that she liked his hands.

Better than his eyebrow.

That was ebony.

Yes.

She wondered why she was repeating herself so much.

Then the Previous Object in Motion made the Object Not in Motion come into motion again. Or something like that.

James hoisted her leg out of the stair and hauled her up onto the same stone step as himself. She suddenly found herself pressed tightly against him, her head on his chest, her knees touching his, and her hands encircled by his larger ones.

It was what the girls in her dormitory would proclaim an “exquisitely compromising position, that.”�

Her lungs stopped working, and the victorious voice in her head insisted for a better look at his eyebrow. Even though it liked his hands better.

She lifted her head from his chest and looked up at him. He was staring down at her, all amusement gone from the deep hazel eyes behind his glasses, replaced by something close to amazement and something else that she didn’t want to contemplate.

And then the book that she had thrown up the stairs slipped and banged down the stairs, toppling spine over cover and stopping at their feet. All her anger from before was renewed in full.

One Book in Motion will prevent two Objects Not in Motion from snogging in the stairwell…

The good voices in Lily’s head came back to life. ‘Run away,’ they were yelling, “Run away with much mustered haste.”�

She bent down, snatched her potions book, and then hastily gathered her books and shoved them violently into her bag, intent on mustering her haste.

“I believe I just saw you handling that library book a little aggressively, dear Lilykins.”�

She didn’t stop gathering her things, “What’s your point?”� she snapped.

“Well it goes back to what I mentioned earlier about destruction of school property…”�

Lily whirled about to face him, her hair doing the frightening halo thing again, “Would you consider yourself school property, Potter?”�

James couldn’t seem to tear his gaze from the tendril of hair that had come to rest directly over her right eye, and he looked a little confused, “Well, I suppose I’m not technically schoo-HOLY HELL WOMAN! What are you _doing_?“

“I’m… _attacking_ …you with…a…BOOK!”� she whacked him about the head one last time and then shoved the book in with the rest of the others, “You aren’t school property, so I feel no remorse in causing destruction on your being.”�

James gaped at her in shock and rubbed the back of his head where she had smacked him.

“Anger management, Lilo. I’m serious,”� he muttered.

Lily screamed in frustration and stomped her foot, “DON’T CALL ME LILO!”�

James stopped rubbing his head, “Ok…Lilo.”� He smirked at her.

Lily growled and made to hit him again, but upon stepping forward to assemble the maximum amount of momentum behind her book, slipped on the previously mentioned piece of parchment containing her potions notes, of which she had not yet managed to stuff into her bag. 

She ended up in the trick stair.

Again.

One Previous Object in Motion that had become an Object Not in Motion and had then slipped on a New Outside Force tends to fall into Previous Outside Forces…

“BLOODY EFFING _HELL_!”� she screamed.

James looked at her in shock, “ _Lilo_ _!_ ”� he exclaimed, “You _cursed_! Profusely! They’ll be writing this down in the history books, they will,”� He wiped a fake tear from his cheek, “Oh, our little Lilykins is growing up so fast…”�

Lily’s face now resembled that of a well-matured radish, and her hands clenched and unclenched at her sides, the ink spreading through the crevasses of her right palm seeping out of their ridges and making their homes underneath the tips of her fingernails.

“Get me out of this stair _right now_ ,”� she hissed at him.

James put his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels, a light appearing in his eyes that bode no good will for poor Lily, “On one condition,”� he said.

Lily closed her eyes. Nothing Potter wanted from her could be any good.

No good.

At all.

Ever.

She clenched her jaw, “And what condition might that be?”�

“You have to come outside with me and work on your anger management skills. It really is unhealthy the way you deal with this. Very bad for you. And very bad for the school property around you as well…”�

Lily glared at him, “It’s going to be very bad for you also if you don’t help me out of this stair right this instant.”�

“I might be close to terrified if it weren’t for the fact that I have your wand,”� retorted James, producing her wand from the depths of his cloak with a flourish and a rueful grin.

Lily gaped, “How…how did you…?”�

“Rule number 287,”� he stuck a finger into the air, “if you want something out of the target, hold his or her wand hostage.”�

He smirked at her and twirled her wand between his fingers.

Lily stared.

“So, Lilo. Will I be escorting you outside to commence with our anger management lessons? Or shall I set your wand here,”� he placed her wand three stairs up from her, just out of her reach, “And leave you to your own devices?”�

Lily stared at her unobtainable wand for a moment before glaring at him, “I really hate you sometimes,”� she said.

“Is that a yes?”�

Lily glared some more, but accepted defeat and sighed in suffering, “Fine.”�

One Previous Object in Motion who steals another Previous Object in Motion’s sole bargaining tool tends to become an Outside Force as well as the possessor of the power to make the Other Previous Object in Motion do whatever the Previous Object in Motion who is now an Outside Force wants. Ish.

“Jolly good!”� James bounced around to the back of her and lifted her by her waist.

To the good little voices’ in Lily’s head immense relief. They weren’t entirely positive another hand-grabbing episode wouldn’t have their poor Lily doing something senseless.

Like snogging him in the stairwell because he had nice hands and a cute eyebrow.

And because they were Objects Not in Motion.

Eek. Senselessness.

Lily snatched up her bag and snapped quill and began stomping up the staircase.

“Stop!”�

Two Previous Objects in Motion, one of which has become an Outside Force in order to make the Other Previous Object in Motion once again an Object in Motion…aw, screw it. She stopped.

And she turned to face James. He was on the stair below her looking at her sternly, his arms ramrod straight by his sides.

“Back straight, soldier!”� he commanded.

Lily nearly obeyed him.

Nearly.

Instead, she managed to roll her eyes, “Potter, cut the military act.”�

James saluted her, “Ma’am, yes ma’am!”� he exclaimed. He relaxed and gave her a friendly smile, “Just wanted to tell you something.”�

Lily waited. He didn’t say anything.

She sighed, “And what was it you wanted to tell me?”�

“No stomping.”�

Lily furrowed her brow, “What?”�

“You’re not allowed to stomp. First lesson in anger management.”�

Lily made a frustrated sound in the back of her throat and stomped her foot fiercely, “James, I-“

“No stomping!”� James exclaimed, “Not only is it bad anger management technique, it also may cause pain in the joints. Specifically the knee, hip, and ankle.”�

Lily stared at him, “Joint pain?”�

James nodded matter-of-factly, “Yes. Joint pain.”�

Lily stared some more.

“Fine. Then what _is_ proper ‘anger management technique?’”�

James smiled, “I’ll show you when we get outside.”�

And he sidled past her and started up the stairs, “Come along, Lilykins!”�

She came very close to stomping her foot.

Two Objects in Motion tend to stay in motion until they get outside, whereupon stuff will happen and cause them to become Two Objects Whose Velocity was Changed by an Outside Force…

But that concerns Newton’s Second Law of Motion, which we will be getting to later.

_**A/N: Readers dismissed! For now...** _

_**Tell me what you think!** _


	2. The Second Law

**_A/N: Oh. My. Merlin._ **

**_Am I updating? Is this happening? Has it actually been nearly six months?_ **

**_Damn. I'm sorry, ya'll. I'm really, truly, terribly sorry._ **

**_But. I'm updating now, and I can actually say that I like this chapter better than the first. And for somewhat of a compensation for making you wait for so long, it's nearly three thousand more words than the last chapter. Plus it's better. In my opinion, at least._ **

**_That said, read on loo-hoos! And don't forget to review!_ **

**_Oh, and as a sidenote- If you have trouble understanding any of the scientific aspects and/or wording in the parts about the Second Law...you may either ask me in a review, and I will do my best to explain in a reply, or you can just ignore it because it really doesn't matter all that much :P_ **

**_-h_ **

**_Disclaimer: Copywright equals me times not wanting to get sued._ **

****

Newton Knows Best Chapter Two:

The Second Law

_For inspiration and lazy Saturdays,_  
And for Isaac Newton, without whom this story   
Quite obviously,   
Wouldn't exist. 

Lily Evans was pissed off.

Royally.

You could tell by the way her hands were clenched at her sides and her robes were billowing around her in a furious wind that didn’t actually exist outside her vicinity. Or at least it seemed that way. Technically, that was impossible.

Technically, it was also impossible for a tree to deliberately take a swing at an innocent passerby. But that impossibility had proven quite possible when the tree Lily Evans had been innocently passing by had walloped her in the stomach with a fist shaped branch. She wasn’t imagining it, either. She had a bruise to prove it.

So perhaps impossibility isn’t all that reliable a theory.

“ _Why_ , exactly,”� asked Lily Evans, thoroughly pissed sixteen-and-a-half-year-old and trainee in the James Potter School for the Terminally Angry, “Are we standing in front of a deranged tree that enjoys causing us physical harm?”�

She glared at the tree with a ferocity that would have wilted flowers in the springtime and incinerated dry leaves in the autumn. To the tree’s credit it did not cower, though it cannot be said that the thought didn’t cross its nonexistent mind. The thought did in fact cross its nonexistent mind, but it decided against the thought because it understood that it was a whole lot bigger than the glaring girl. And it also understood that the black haired one with the spectacles was in possession of her stick.

Incidentally, another thing it understood was that her stick was made out of willow. The tree being of the willow variety itself, that fact rather ticked it off. That fact actually made it want to catapult the red haired one through the air with a considerable amount of force.

Force, the tree did not understand because it had never taken a Physics class and it was not actually in possession of a mind, equals mass times acceleration: Newton’s Second Law of Motion. Simplified, of course, as the entire law involves direct and inverse proportionality, directional vectors, and quantitative calculus. However, Lily Evans and James Potter neither one enjoyed the field of mathematics particularly much, were in fact rather atrocious at it, and were also in the opinion that this specific subject should burn in hell on repeated occasions. So we’ll declare the finer aspects of the Second Law to be null, void, and completely beside the point.

The point being that the tree’s thoughts were a prime example of a potential demonstration of the previously mentioned Second Law of one dearly departed Isaac Newton.

Hands clasped behind his back and weight on the heels of his feet, James Potter stood beside his red-haired charge and looked up at the furiously swinging tree. He was studying it with a studious countenance. He was watching it with a watchful eye. He was observing it with an observant mind. He was memorizing it with a memorative memory.

He was scratching his bum discreetly. And he was being unnaturally successful at it (most people, namely Lily Evans, were in the opinion that scratching one’s bum was not actually a particularly discreet thing to do), as this action was going unnoticed by his charge. Which is fortunate, because otherwise Lily Evans might not have been able to hold her temper for the amount of time necessary for this story to actually take place.

After his bum was sufficiently scratched, James took part in the occasional stroke of his chin in a thoughtful gesture, repeated wiggling of the eyebrows (which, you’ll remember, Lily Evans found to be abnormally attractive) in thought, and the voicing of various intellectual statements such as, “Hmmm,”� “Ahhhh,”� “How extraordinary,”� and “ _In_ teresting…”�

However, he ceased the production of the intellectual statements temporarily when a certain Miss Evans asked him a certain question pertaining to their certain whereabouts and goings-on in front of a certain tree.

“We,”� he stated as an answer, “are observing.”�

_In_ teresting…

Lily let out a short, irritated breath and shot James a sideways glare. “Observing,”� she repeated dryly. He nodded his head matter-of-factly and cocked his head slightly to the left in order to _observe_ the tree from a different angle.

“Ahhh,”� he said, “How _extraordinary_.”� He pronounced the adjective as a juxtaposition of the words “extra”� and “ordinary”� instead of ignoring the ‘a’ in the word as is customary. He did it to annoy the girl standing beside him. She was well aware of this fact. It made her want to Second Law him.

Which means she quite wanted to accelerate James’ mass with the amount of force necessary to place him straight in the path of one of the tree’s flailing branches. She didn’t, though. Mainly because she thought it wouldn’t get her her wand back any time before Gladderbee’s Comet came round again (Gladderbee’s Comet passes the Earth every five hundred years, and only if it happens to be a year in which a leprechaun of the age of six hundred and sixty-nine years old has died standing up, his left eye closed in a wink, while he is having a flirtation with a fairy with green wings. In the entire infinite expanse of time, Gladderbee’s Comet has only passed the Earth an extra-ordinary total of zero consecutive times).

Her wandless state, for the record, had been induced by the fact that she had attempted to hit him on the sly with a full-body bind and make a frantic break for it. Obviously, she had been unsuccessful.

She was pretty pissed about that as well.

James made another intellectual statement and Lily came within another inch of Second Law-ing him. Instead she took a deep, calming breath, attempted to adjust her karma, and started to count to twenty. She failed dismally at all three endeavors as the deep breath was unsuccessful at being remotely calming considering it was really rather shallow, her karma was refusing to adjust because it was deathly paranoid of change, and she only made it to two and three-quarters in her count to twenty before her mind began contemplating various ways to give the boy beside her a mild to slightly moderate concussion.

In her defense, she had restrained herself from contemplating ways of giving him an especially to extra-ordinarily serious concussion that would result in perhaps (hopefully) sending him into a coma.

“ _Why_ ,then”� she gritted out, “are we _observing_ a deranged tree that enjoys causing us physical harm?”�

James pushed his glasses a little higher up the bridge of his nose and turned to Lily in a manner entirely suggestive of a teacher putting on a great show of helping a student figure an answer by themselves. “Why do _you_ think we are observing the tree, Miss Evans?”� he queried, his expression one of utmost interest.

Playing school was not something Lily Evans ever particularly enjoyed while muddling through her younger years, and her opinion of the game hadn’t changed overly much since then. _Real_ classrooms with _real_ teachers and _real_ lessons were more her preference. And _real_ books, come to think of it. Not violent objects that can eventually be _converted_ into books. Reviewing fundamentals or extracting the complexities of a problem she believed in, but she found tracing a book all the way back to it’s bona fide roots a tad bit extreme.

Sarcasm, she thought, would serve her best in this particular situation. “Well I don’t know, _Professor_ , how about I ask the expert?”�

James lifted a finger in a commendatory fashion and looked at her as if he were quite proud of her answer. “Ahhhh, a brilliant postulation, Miss Evans. Go right ahead.”� He smiled at her benignly and held his hands in invitation towards the thrashing limbs of the tree.

Long since resigned to the fact that James Potter lived to make everything infinitely more complex and irritating than was absolutely necessary, Lily merely sighed and looked at him dryly. “I wouldn’t want to _disturb_ him from his obviously important activity of ripping himself apart, so how about I just ask you?”� she said flatly, ignoring the invitation to speak to the tree. James lowered his hands.

“Well, I suppose you have a point.”�

James turned to observe the tree again and lifted a hand to scratch the top of his head. He watched in interest as one of the tree’s branches coiled itself around its own base and ripped itself from the tree. “Hmmm,”� he said.

Then he grinned at her. She didn’t return the facial expression. Unsurprisingly, this didn’t detain him. “Very considerate of you, Miss Evans.”�

Continuing to grin, he turned back towards the tree and extended his arms in a dramatic, all-encompassing manner. “Case in point,”� he stated.

Lily remained staring at the tree a bit longer, her arms folded across her chest with the dual purpose of expressing her extreme dislike for her situation as well as somewhat protecting herself against the bitter cold. Finally, she turned her head to face James again. “What,”� she asked, “did that mean?”�

James gestured to the tree once more. “This tree,”� he said, “is my entire case in point.”�

“And how is that?”�

“This tree,”� he stated again, throwing an arm around her shoulders in a friendly manner he knew would irritate the magic out of her, “is a superlative living metaphor of the abstract idea of anger. It’s like an Emily Dickinson poem…only _better_.”�

His tone suggested he found this statement to be more than a little impressive. Which, in fact, it was.

Completely thrown off by the fact that _James Potter_ knew anything at all, let alone enough about Emily Dickinson to allude to her poetry, concerning life outside the Wizarding world, Lily was capable of only gaping at him uncomprehendingly. He took this to mean that she was not intelligent enough to understand his reasoning without further explanation and so, taking her chin with his hand, turned her face back towards the tree.

“Observe,”� he ordered, not releasing her chin. There was a noise that sounded distinctly like a broomstick snapping followed by the noisy hurtling of one the tree’s larger branches out of the masses of writhing limbs gracing the top of the tree. The furiously thrashing branch splashed into the lake and writhed there as if it were one of the giant squid’s oversized tentacles come to throw a hissy fit about they way the merpeople were treating it.

James bobbed Lily’s head up and down with the hand grasping her chin. “Oh, I understand now, James,”� he said in a high-pitched voice that sounded as if it belonged to a doxy. He squeezed his fingers against her cheeks as he spoke so that she looked like a giant talking fish.

He continued, “Leaving my anger unmanaged will only lead to self-degenerative behavior, stabbing joint pain, an early death due to high stress levels and the self-excommunication of my own limbs from my body.”�

Displaying a commendatory amount of self-control, Lily kept her gaze firmly fixed ahead of her and spoke calmly through her puckered lips.

“Are you quite finished now?”� She spoke in a nasally voice due to the fact that her upper lip was blocking air from exiting either of her nostrils.

James shook his head. “No, actually,”� he said, “I was planning on doing a rendition of the school song right quick.”� He took a deep breath, “HOGWARTS, HOGWARTS, HOGGY-WART-“

He was cut off as Lily jerked her face from his grasp, stepped back so that she was facing him directly, and lifted her knee up as high as possible so that she could stomp down directly onto the top of his foot, her heel pointing downwards for maximum pain induce-age.

One Decent Sized Foot In Motion, traveling with an Excessive Amount of Acceleration, will produce enough force necessary to cause Extraordinary Pain to Another Rather Large Foot Not in Motion.

Which translates to James Potter’s rather large foot being in a bit of a, and here we can allude to Lily’s dorm-mates once again, ‘exquisitely compromising position, that.’ Though this particular situation was most likely not what Lily’s dorm-mates were originally referring to, we will claim artistic license and continue with the story.

Fortunately for James Potter, Lily Evans’ foot, despite it’s bone-crushing force, didn’t quite make it to the actual feat of crushing his bones. This was partly because at the point at which her heel was a mere 2.8 centimeters from his foot, she suddenly remembered that foot-stomping was not proper anger management technique.

But mostly it was because a hard, thin, snakelike branch had wrapped around her knee, coiled about her waist, and yanked her backwards as if she were a very large talking fish that had eaten the worm that happened to be speared onto a fishing hook attached to a line, attached to a reel, attached to a trunk of a very pissed off tree capable of violent movement.

The resulting scream could have deafened a banshee and in fact terrorized James’ eardrums to such a high degree that he found himself bent over, hands over his ears, wailing in agony, unaware that this action placed him within the reach of the Whomping Willow as well.

It would have deafened the tree as well, but the tree didn’t have any ears, so it didn’t.

The tree, you see, had been waiting for the opportune moment in which to catapult the red-haired one through the air with a considerable amount of force. Its nonexistent mind had decided that it was very likely that the willow her stick was made out of could quite possibly have been its great-grandfather’s cousin’s niece’s daughter’s divorced husband’s best friend’s financial advisor. Its nonexistent mind reckoned that this was cause for revenge, and had therefore bided its time until the red-haired one had stepped into its reach. It was all quite extraordinary for a living thing with no means of communication, let alone a working brain.

The Whomping Willow (who, if anyone cared to know, which no one did, which was part of the reason why the tree was always so angry, had a name. It was Willamona, and it assumed it was a female, though it had no genitalia to distinguish itself by. But that’s actually a bit disturbing, so we’ll bypass that discussion and end the parentheses here.) flailed the red-haired one around a bit, slinging her about in the air above it as if she were a yo-yo in the possession of a small, destructive child.

And then it catapulted her towards the Quidditch stadium.

It catapulted the black haired one as well. Just for the principle of the thing. It had a reputation to uphold, you must understand. To be fair, the tree was quite misunderstood by its peers (who, incidentally, were not capable of excessive violent movement. The tree was in the mind that perhaps the other trees were a teensy bit jealous. Though it couldn’t understand in the least why. Who enjoys being capable of ripping their own limbs off?). That sort of mental hardship is not good for one’s psyche. Those shunned by their peers often result to violence to express their inner emotions of turmoil and misery.

But dearly departed Isaac Newton was not a professor of psychology, so we will not analyze Willamona’s actions any further. We will, however, analyze the predicament of poor Lily and James.

Two Objects catapulted through the air with a Considerable Force will have a Change of Velocity relative to that of the Objects’ mass multiplied by the Objects’ acceleration. Which means James and Lily were traveling through the air at a considerable speed and whatever surface they hit would most likely cause considerable damage to their being.

And also hurt a considerable amount.

In scientific terms, it could be said that the mass that was Lily and James hurtling through the air uncontrollably and with no means of slowing their rapid approach to the snow drift just outside the entrance to the Quidditch stadium, contained a very high degree of entropy. In every day English terms, it could be said that there was a very high degree of randomness and/or chaos taking place in the locality of Lily and James.

To describe the situation with more detail, it can be said that had the actions of the two people in the air taken place safely on the ground, it would have been considered extra-ordinarily uncivilized behavior.

And to describe the situation with even _more_ detail, it can be said that Lily’s heel, though temporarily detained from crushing James’s right foot, was now doing a very thorough job of denying him his ability to scream by taking residence in the hollow just beneath his Adam’s apple and digging down with an increasing amount of pressure. It can also be said that James’ hand, through no fault of his own, had somehow become tangled in Lily’s robes, and with the combined effect of the flailing of each of the two’s four limbs, was now thoroughly stuck up the front of her shirt.

Whether or not this was in actuality a secret fantasy of James’ inner-most self is completely beside the point and unsuitable for sophisticated conversation.

The black mass of tangled limbs flailed through the air as if it were some sort of gelatinous meteorite with a flaming tail of red hair. Had any of the students besides James and Lily been stupid enough to wander outside in the bitterly cold weather, they might have assumed one of three things: the world was coming to an end, the aliens were finally invading, or somewhere out there a mass number of six hundred and sixty-nine year old leprechauns had all died standing up, left eye closed in a wink, while flirting with a mass number of fairies with green wings, thus causing Gladderbee’s comet to bypass merely passing the Earth peacefully and instead come crashing down to land in a spiraling heap of entropy.

One Spiraling Heap of Entropy traveling through the air with the acceleration one might expect from a Comet Hurtling Towards the Earth will hit a Snow Bank with enough force to send a plume of the white powder Spraying Outwards like the contents of a Gravy Boat hitting a Slytherin on the chest.

There were two good things about this particular snow bank, however. One was that it was an accumulation of very freshly fallen snow and therefore soft enough to cushion the catapulting of Lily and James enough so that neither one suffered from any broken bones and/or dislocated joints.

The other was that it was located just in front of the next destination on Professor Potter’s agenda.

“Ow,”� said Professor Potter. Then, “How _extra-ordinary_! I do believe that’s the fastest I’ve made it from the Whomping Willow to the Quidditch stadium in my entire seven years at Hogwarts!”�

Eyes closed in an attempt to calm her inner-self enough to accept the fact that she’d just survived a near-death experience with the one person she’d least like to die alongside in the entirety of the world, Lily merely continued to breathe through her nose and ignore James.

Besides, that is, to add a little sarcasm to the situation. “I’m so happy for you,”� she told him.

James smiled happily and craned his neck to look over his shoulder towards the Whomping Willow (which was now shaking its branches in a way that distinctly resembled the manner in which a fat man’s multiple chins might jiggle when he is roaring drunk and laughing uproariously at an excessively unamusing joke). In this action, he caused three things to happen in rapid succession.

The first was that as a result of the muscles in his neck stretching to such an extreme, a bit of a rippling effect occurred down his body, causing the muscles in his shoulders, arms, and torso to adjust just slightly in order to keep his neck from straining.

The second was that as a result of this rippling action, his left shoulder blade disturbed a bit of unstable snow around the edges of the hole he and Lily were now tangled within.

And the third was that Lily’s eyes snapped open in surprise because not only was she now being buried beneath a mass of fluffy white snow, it had also just come to her attention that there was a hand resting on her left bosom that was most distinctly _not_ hers.

Exquisitely Compromising Positions equals Miniature Avalanches multiplied by Rogue Hands.

The mass of snow that had been resting on a crossbeam of the Quidditch stadium until being rudely disturbed by James’ shoulder blade finished its noisy descent a mere three seconds after it began, leaving a profound silence in its wake and the two heads of Lily Evans and James Potter poked out the top of the snow like two small stumps blinking at each other in profound surprise.

The red stump looked at the black stump and blinked slowly before fixing it with a look that compacted all the past seven years’ insults into one hard stare.

“You will kindly remove your hand from my breast,”� it said.

The eyes behind the black stump’s crooked spectacles widened beyond the normal stretches of eye-widening. The red stump was strongly reminded of a tarsier.

“I…it…you…,”� the black stump was mouthing incoherently.

“James, just shut up and remove your hand!”� Lily exclaimed, tossing her head angrily as best she could considering she was buried in snow up to her chin.

She felt the hand beneath her shirt move slightly as if to get its bearings.

“James!”�

The hand stopped moving immediately and its owner’s eyes widened even more. “I’m sorry!”� he exclaimed, “I’m trying to move it!”�

“Well don’t _touch_ me while you do it!”�

He stared at her. “Erm…that’s going to be a bit…difficult what with all the…snow…and all…”�

Lily glared. “Well then try _really hard_.”�

James nodded and a look of deep concentration overtook his features as tried to retract his hand without touching her. It didn’t work.

“James!”�

“I’m sorry!”�

They stared at each other, unmoving. A pained look crossed James’ face as Lily took a deep breath, inevitably causing her chest to rise.

“I’m sor-“ he began.

“Just be quiet a minute,”� she cut him off. She took another deep breath and another pained look crossed James’ face. He opened his mouth again. She cut him off.

“Alright. I think we’re going to have to make a compromise here,”� she said. James nodded mutely, looking highly uncomfortable with her breathing.

Briskly, she continued, “Right then. I will be willing to ignore the fact that your hand is coming into contact with inappropriate parts of my body if you agree to remove said hand as quickly as possible,”� she said.

James swallowed and nodded his head again. He took a deep breath as if to prepare himself but was abruptly cut off before he could attempt to follow her orders.

“And!”� Lily stopped him. He looked at her. “We will both forget this ever happened.”�

Once again, James nodded mutely, though it can be said that he had serious doubts of ever obtaining the ability to forget this particular occurrence. In fact, he was pretty much positive that there was no way in all the expanses of land devoid of a crashed Gladderbee’s Comet that he would be forgetting this particular occurrence.

Lily nodded at him once.

“Ok,”� she said. “Proceed.”�

Immediately, she felt James’ hand scoot down rapidly, stopping abruptly at her stomach. He rotated his shoulders until enough snow was shoved out of the way to make a circular area of free space around him. Lily ordered herself to ignore the doxies raging in her stomach as he squirmed out of the hole and his fingertips disappeared from her stomach.

James collapsed onto the snow bank, his arms thrown out by his sides. “Sweet Merlin,”� he muttered. “Sweet _Merlin_ …”�

Lily had to agree. Mentally, that is. Voicing the opinion was a different matter entirely.

She squirmed around a bit in the snow and watched in helplessness as her actions merely caused more snow to fall on top of her. She sighed in defeat. “James?”� she asked.

He continued to stare at the sky with wide eyes through his crooked glasses. Lily squirmed a bit more. “James?”� He didn’t move.

“JAMES!”� she roared.

He jumped violently and sprang into a sitting position, throwing his hands over his head. After a few moments of labored breathing, he peeked an eye out from between his arms. Lily looked at him dryly.

“I’m kind of stuck,”� she stated, looking with meaning down at the pile of white where her body should otherwise have been. James blinked at her for a few moments before slowly extracting his wand from his pocket. Muttering a charm under his breath, he levitated the snow over to the other side of the stadium entrance.

Lily unfolded herself from her contorted position in her hole of snow and dusted her robes off.

She looked up to find James still staring at her. “Thank you,”� she said.

He nodded mutely. She held out her hand. He stared at it for a bit before slowly reaching out to shake it. She sighed.

“I meant for you to give me back my wand, James,”� she told him. He blinked at this, still gripping her hand, and then stared at her uncomprehending until his face suddenly broke out into a maniacal grin.

“Come along, Lilykins!”� he trilled, bounding into the stadium and dragging her behind him. She stumbled after him, marveling at his sudden change of mood and wondering how in Merlin’s name she had gotten herself in this situation.

“Wha-“ she began, but could no longer continue when she found a mouthful of the back of James’ robes in her mouth. She sputtered and stepped back from his suddenly no longer mobile self and looked around his shoulder as he squatted in the middle of the field.

He was fiddling with the clasps of a large wooden box.

Lily furrowed her brow. “What’re you doing?”� she asked.

He grinned up at her. “I bet you’re furious,”� he said.

Lily blinked at him. “Huh?”�

He turned back to the box. “I bet you’re absolutely furious that I got you launched through the air by a tree, buried beneath a mound of snow, and then accidentally molested.”�

Her eyes narrowed and the impossibility of a wind only in her vicinity began showing signs of reappearing. Her fists clinched at her sides.

“As a matter of fact-“

“Hold this,”� interrupted James. He pressed a Beater’s bat in her hand quickly and turned back to fiddling with the box. She stared at the bat for a bit before huffing and throwing it down onto the snow-covered field.

“I do not WANT-“

“Move over a bit,”� he interrupted again, reaching a hand up to push her two steps back.

“JAMES POT-“

“You dropped this,”� he once again interrupted, pushing the discarded Beater’s bat back into her hands and turning back to the box. Lily began showing signs of premature death by self-combustion and threw her arms into the air.

“DO _NOT_ TELL ME WHA-“

“You might want to duck,”� he finally stated, glancing backwards over his shoulder. Then he released the leather belt restraining one of the pair of Bludgers inside the box and dove out of the way. Lily stared for only a second before screaming and throwing herself onto the ground as the Bludger flew full force at her head.

“What do you think you’re _doing_?”� she screamed at James.

Glancing up to watch the path of the Bludger, which was turning in an arch fifty feet above the ground to come hurtling back towards them, James stood up and made his way over to Lily.

“I’m teaching you anger management,”� he told her as he reached down blindly (he was still watching the path of the Bludger) and hauled her up unceremoniously by her robes.

She huffed indignantly and jerked out of his grasp. “What, by trying to _kill_ me?”� she exclaimed hysterically.

He took his gaze off the Bludger and looked down at the seething red-head. “If that’s what it takes,”� he grinned. She gaped at him. “Now you might want to try actually _hitting_ the Bludger this time.”�

Narrowing her eyes ferociously, Lily growled like an enraged Acromantula and reared her arm back as far as it could go before swinging it down with enough force to knock a hippogriff cold. She aimed directly at James’ head.

He ducked quickly. The wood of the bat connected instead with the dive-bombing Bludger.

One Accelerating Bat connecting with One Bludger Intent on Killing with enough force to Knock a Hippogriff Cold will send the Bludger careening with a high Acceleration in the Opposite Direction and leave in its wake a Much More Satisfied Angry Female.

Simplified: Lily smacked the Bludger ferociously and felt much the better for it.

Lily stared after the Bludger and breathed a little easier. She had rather enjoyed that. It was a rather good…release of her anger.

“See?”� James said. “Violence solves everything.”� He grinned at her.

And, to the astonishment of the nonliving Quidditch stadium as well as the rapidly approaching Bludger as well as James Potter himself, Lily Evans grinned back.

Which is perhaps why he didn’t duck quite quickly enough.

See, the previously mentioned rapidly approaching astonished Bludger was doing just what it’s name implied. It was rapidly approaching at an astonishing speed intending to bludge someone’s head in.

Of course, with Lily’s newfound enjoyment of violently beating flying projectiles, it was only natural for her to take another ferocious swing at it. And with James’ newfound astonishment at having Lily Evans grin at him, he didn’t quite notice the ferociously smacked Bludger coming straight at his head.

It was all fairly inevitable, what happened next.

Force equals mass times acceleration until the object in question is no longer accelerating due to the fact that it has come in contact with a Nonmoving Head, whereupon it’s action will have an equal and opposite reaction and the Nonmoving Head as well as the Accelerating Object will be knocked out cold in the middle of the Quidditch stadium.

But all that involves Newton’s _Third_ Law of Motion, which we will, as you know, be getting to later.

_End of Chapter_

'A tarsier is a small nocturnal animal with quite possibly the largest eyes I have ever seen in my entire eighteen-and-almost-a-half years of living. It looks a bit like a mix between a chipmunk and a lemur, and it's eyes literally take up about half of its head. I'm serious. Go google it if you don't believe me.

**_A/N: Reader's dismissed! For now..._**

**_And this time, I swear I'll update in less than seven months. Much less, if all goes according to plan. Which it will if I have anything to say about it._ **

**_Again, I have to admit that I rather like this chapter. Sorry again for the excessively unnecessary long wait. It took forever to get inspired for this thing._ **

**_Let me know what you think!_ **

**_-h_ **


	3. The Third Law

**_A/N: So I sat down at the computer today, and I said to myself, I said, "Holly, you are finishing_ ** **_Newton_ ** **_today."_ **

**_And so I did. Somewhat. I suppose it's now actually tomorrow, being that it's nearly 1 in the morning, but that's a mere technicality, isn't it?_ **

**_So, here it is, the third and final chapter. Not quite as long as the last, but I do hope you still enjoy it. Tell me what you think, loo-hoos!_ **

**_-h_ **

_**PS: If the title and dedication below aren't centered AGAIN, could someone tell me what exactly I'm doing wrong with the coding? And if they are...well, then just ignore this and praise whatever deity you are in the habit of praising.**_   


**_Disclaimer: Every Illegally Claimed Potterverse has an equal and opposite Bank-breaking Lawsuit. Not mine._ **

[center]Newton Knows Best Chapter Three:

The Third Law

_For green tea,_  
Because I love it.  
And for Cath,  
Because she has a thing for Grawp's nipples. 

_...And I love her._ [/center]  


Madam Pomfrey was pissed off.

Royally.

Glass vials of brightly-colored, putrid-smelling, frolicsomely-fizzing potions tinkled furiously as she sifted through them with deft fingers, like a chandelier that’s had the misfortune of becoming the preferred headquarters of a certain petulant poltergeist called Peeves. Lily wondered vaguely which Unbreakable Charm had been used on them and whether or not, if she used it on herself, it would help prevent her from breaking down and dissolving into hysterical torrents of tears.

Somehow, she thought it wouldn’t.

“Come on, James,” she muttered, leaning over the inert form of a black-haired, sopping-wet boy whose broken spectacles she removed gently and set on the table beside the crisp white-sheeted hospital bed, “Wake up, now.”

Tears blurred his figure as she removed his glasses, as if they had been removed from her own face, and she sniffed pitifully as a droplet fell from an eyelash and dripped onto his nose. The chinking of the vials stopped suddenly, and Lily quickly brought an arm up to wipe her face with her sleeve.

“Oh, for Merlin’s love of pumpkin juice, the boy’s wet enough already without you crying all over him, Miss Evans,” it was said in a stern tone that didn’t fit the compassionate action of handing the sniffling girl a small handkerchief.

Lily took the offered tissue with what was to be presumed an apologetic remark, though it sounded somewhat more like a doxy agonizing through his dying throws after having been lightly spritzed with a gentle mist of Demented Don’s Deranged as a Dementor Doxy Decimator Drizzle.

Lily Evans was distraught.

Distressingly so.

It was fairly obvious, what with her unintelligible gurgles and wailings, but it can also be said that had the entire world been deaf and unable to hear these worrying sniffles, her distraught state of being could have _still_ been deciphered from the simple fact that she was _clutching_ in _both hands_ , James Potter’s _limp left hand_ and _holding his fingers tenderly to her chin_.

It was a sight that warranted the extreme overuse of italics as well as the extreme over-surprise of one Remus J. Lupin.

“Um, Lily?” he queried uncertainly, quite convinced that he was perhaps hallucinating the vision before him. He tugged the edge of the flower-printed hangings blocking his hospital bed from view aside a bit more and squinted towards the bed opposite the room.

Lily, for her part, did not give quite the pitiful, blubbering, agonizing-death-throws-of-a-doxy answer to poor Remus as she had to the school nurse, but she did counteract that small favor by turning to look at him with wide, glistening, sad eyes and a trembling lower lip that just barely brushed the tops of his best friend’s curled, limp fingers.

Remus thought that perhaps he should have stayed hidden behind his curtains. That or cracked the water pitcher beside his bed over his skull. Maybe catapulted himself out the window behind him. Or impaled himself with the metal leg of the bedside table. Teenaged boys and crying girls are a combination wrought with discomfort, and the teenaged boys, for one, would quite rather go on a date with a hag with a body odor difficulty than be faced with said crying girls.

Their reasoning behind it was quite simple, and most often quite accurate…whatever they did in the situation, it was almost always the _wrong_ thing.

Such was Remus J. Lupin’s logic when faced with a crying Lily Evans. But being that he was perfectly unable to ignore her sad gaze without feeling himself a despicable, insensitive prat worthy of stoning and mudslinging, and being that he was also perfectly unable to move fast enough to catapult himself out the window properly after his transformation the night before, he submitted to his fate and consulted his brain in order to remember the list of rules the male population of Hogwarts had devised on the subject.

Rule Number One: Be sympathetic.

He could do that.

“Er…er, um…what’s…what’s wrong?”

Remus’ mind flew into a panic and he cursed himself for not remembering the second rule (Never, ever, under any circumstances ask the question ‘what’s wrong?’ if you don’t want to have to cast multiple drying spells on your shirt and/or listen to an hour long, unintelligible explanation that you will then have to pass the correct judgment upon lest you want a heavy object thrown at your head.), as his query was met with a tiny, quavering whimper and rivulets of tears streaming down the distraught girl’s face. She gasped in a little breath before she whispered, audible only to Remus, and that was because it was just a full moon and his hearing was a bit sharper than usual,

“I thought…I thought I’d killed him with a bludger.”

Remus thought fleetingly that surely there was a quite hilarious story behind that particular statement, but deduced that querying on that line of thought would most likely induce _more_ tears from Miss Evans, and therefore decided to focus on the positive.

“Well, he _isn’t_ killed though, is he?”

It was said with an encouraging sort of tone, accompanied by a soft, sympathetic sort of wave of the hand towards the limp form that was Mr. Potter, and a hesitant sort of smile that suggested the severe trepidation Mr. Lupin was currently feeling as to what, exactly, the Crying Girl would do next.

Which, as completely amazing as it may be, was to cry some more.

“No,” she wailed, “he isn’t killed, but I _thought_ he was killed! He _might_ have been killed!”

Remus squirmed in his hospital bed as if unnecessary movement might provide some sort of barrier between him and the Crying Girl, and in his state of complete mystification as to what to do, settled upon grabbing his water glass quickly and draining what little didn’t splash out as a result of the sudden seizing of it. He set it down quickly again, though in a bit more gentle manner than when he’d picked it up, and scratched the back of his head uncomfortably.

“Erm…well…still, he isn’t killed. That’s a check in the pro column, isn’t it?”

Remus liked to think in terms of charts and graphs, as it were, due in part to his, as his friends referred to it, “beastly ailment,” with which it was necessary to constantly consult moon charts. Also in the favor of charts and graphs was the fact that it took a chart of ingredients, and a web graph of spells, and an interesting map of Hogwarts, for his three friends to learn to be Animagi and help him out with his previously mentioned “beastly ailment.”

Therefore, he often referred to pro columns and con columns. Especially since he often thought of his life in this way.

Pro to Lycanthropy: He could smell when the house elves were making treacle tart all the way from two corridors up from the Great Hall, and could therefore maneuver his way to the front of The Marauders in order to get there first, and get his share before the other three attacked it like starving hinkypunks and left none for a kind-hearted werewolf.

Con to Lycanthropy: Beastliness.

Simple logic, see. It helped him put his life in perspective.

Lily Evans, however, didn’t seem to share in his logic, and in response to his comment about pro columns, only burst into another flood of tears. She then, in order to comply with, and I know you were wondering when this would come up, the great Sir Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion, counteracted his statement with a con of her own.

Every Action has an Equal and Opposite Reaction. Capitalized as with a title as a result of it being so important.

“He…may…not be…dead,” she gasped out between sobs, “But he… _is_ …totally…incapacitated and…not… _moving_ and he…made me think…he isn’t…he isn’t…” Miss Evans found she could not finish her statement due to the fact that the finishing of it would have quite overstepped the ‘equal and opposite’ bit of the ‘reaction’ bit of the ‘law,’ and everyone knows you can’t break a law.

Remus Lupin, however, had aided and abetted and more times than not actively participated in breaking the law, and therefore saw no reason to resist the overstepping of one.

“Made you think he isn’t what?”

Lily shook her head furiously and buried her face on James’ chest. A muffled answer floated to Remus from across the room, and he frowned.

“He isn’t a lad stuck in Jell-O?” Remus scratched the side of his nose. “No, I don’t suppose he is, but you’d better not mention that to him, because he’d think it a grand idea and then _I’d_ be stuck having to remove him…and Sirius, for that matter. Better not tell him about it either.”

Lily lifted her head to stare across the room at Remus. He was relieved to find that she was no longer crying. Only sniffing occasionally.

“I didn’t say anything about Jell-O. I said I thought he wasn’t a bad sort of fellow.”

Remus looked at her. “Oh,” he said, “well, all the same, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention the Jell-O idea to him, because…did you say that _you_ didn’t think _James_ was a bad sort of fellow?”

Lily buried her head back in James’ chest and nodded.

“And we’re talking about James?”

She nodded again.

“James Potter?”

Nod.

"The one you're face is buried on?"

Nod.

“Of the Sixth Year boys’ dormitory in Gryffindor Tower?”

Nod.

“James Potter, boy who charmed all your books to show you only page 267 of your next class’ text in third year?”

No- Lily’s head snapped up. “That was _him_?”

“Moooonnnyyy! Why would you tell her that?”

Both Remus’ and Lily’s heads snapped to the previously limp body residing on the hospital bed beside Lily.

“James!” they both cried, and Lily threw her arms around his neck.

James’ eyes widened a bit before he suddenly squinted them and turned his face towards Lily’s head on his shoulder.

“I’m blind without my glasses,” he said, turning to look sorrowfully past her shoulder at Remus, “but I can tell that’s Lily’s hair right there. I hate it when Pomfrey gives me that Skele-Gro. It always makes me have hallucinations like this.”

Remus merely raised an eyebrow at his friend before there was suddenly a flurry of motion, and Lily Evans reared back to smack James Potter on the chest. James’ eyes widened considerably.

“Except she usually doesn’t do that,” he mentioned, before he was smacked once again, and ceased all other activity besides covering his head with his arms and backing into his pillows for protection.

Lily huffed at his cowering and snatched his glasses from the table. Grabbing his hand, she shoved them into it before sitting back and crossing her arms over her chest. James unfolded his arms from his head slowly and cut his eyes to her warily as he slowly put on his glasses.

“Are you going to hit me again?”

He was answered with narrowed eyes.

“No?”

More narrowed eyes. James turned to Remus.

“Moony, is she going to hit me again?”

Remus glanced at the angry (but, thank Merlin’s flannel boxer shorts, no longer crying) girl.

“She might,” he said. “Depends.”

James cut his eyes back to Lily. “On what?”

“No idea. It’s just that usually with girls it depends.”

James took his eyes off Lily long enough to throw Remus a disgusted look. “A lot of help you are,” he said.

Remus just shrugged and leaned over to dig through the school bag at the side of his bed, effectively disengaging himself from the conversation and leaving his friend entirely and completely alone to face the Angry Girl.

He heard James shift in his bed and then a tentative, “So…Lilo. How’re things?”

Remus winced for his friend and ducked behind his Transfiguration textbook.

There was a huff from Lily, and then, “How’re things? Oh, I’ll tell you how things are, James Potter. Things are _very bad_ , that’s how things are.”

James reached up to run a hand through his hair, but stopped when he realized his entire head was bandaged and Lily was eyeing his hand with severe annoyance.

“Are they?” he asked. “Well, that’s…that’s…very bad,” he finished lamely.

Lily nodded curtly. “Yes, it is,” she said.

There is a specific gene resting in the very middle, central part of the second X chromosome in the female karyotype, which allows the female the ability to circumnavigate actually voicing audibly and in incontrovertible terms, the specific transgressions of a male, and in fact force him to admit, inadvertently of course, his own contravention in no uncertain terms, thereby leaving him with his own hole very successfully dug and no means by which to un-dig himself.

In other words, the ability to confuse James Potter to the point of incriminating and/or quite thoroughly setting himself up for impending doom was programmed into Lily Evans’ DNA.

This is the rather unnecessarily complicated explanation for what happened next. But, in more comprehensive terms, we can just go back to the third law.

Here is the action:

James Potter squirmed in his hospital bed as Lily Evans simply sat staring at him intensely, in an almost accusing sort of manner, until he simply could not take it anymore, and determined that if he didn’t at the very _least_ ask her _why_ things were so bad, he would go the rest of his life thinking himself lower than the lowest point in the ocean. Dirtier than the dirtiest section of Severus Snape’s greasy hair. More pathetic than the most pathetic wail issuing from Myrtle’s haunted bathroom.

And so on and so forth on that line of thought.

He therefore brought a hand to the back of his neck, nervously glanced at the intensely staring Lily Evans, and asked, “Erm…uh…why? Are things so bad?”

Here is the equal and opposite reaction:

Flaming eyes, James Potter would swear to it in days to come, her eyes had _caught fire_.

“Because of you, James Potter, it is _entirely_ your fault!” And thus began the rant. It was a full-fledged rant, one in which many subjects were discussed, and then discussed further still, and discussed even further after that, until James Potter’s eyes were stuck quite thoroughly in an abnormally wide position as a result of the discovery that quite possibly every single very bad thing that had ever happened to anyone on the entire planet could be attributed to himself and his “prat-like characteristics.”

It was a rant on cold feet (in the literal sense, of course, being that her feet were rather freezing due to the excessive amount of snow that wedged itself in her shoes as she dragged him up to the hospital wing), on sore shoulders (as a result of the actual dragging bit I just mentioned), on faulty anger management techniques (she didn’t like to admit that the technique had actually worked quite well up to the point at which it caused his head to be bludged in.), on making her think he was deader than Merlin’s favorite pet pixie (she also didn’t like to admit that he really couldn’t help that fact since she’d inadvertently bludged his head in), and, most importantly of all, on-

“---making me think you’re not a bad sort of fellow. Maybe even a _decent_ sort of fellow! A decent bloke. _You_ , James. Can you imagine? I will _never_ forgive you for this! Never!”

For those of you who think that this could not possibly be an equal and opposite reaction to the simple question “why?”, I will simply remind you that Lily Evans is a female, James Potter is a male, and Lily Evans had been recently reprimanded, annoyed, accidentally _fondled_ , scared magicless, and forced to admit something she didn’t want to admit by one James Potter, and if you’ve ever been in the presence of a severely stressed female, you’ll wonder why I didn’t include an explosion and a swift kick in the unmentionables in the reaction.

James’ poor brain had quite imploded by this point, especially because he’d received a very severe bludge to the head as well as a long-winded speech by an angry Miss Evans, and he found himself incapable of any sort of intelligible thought besides that of,

“You think I’m a decent sort of fellow?”

And if Lily hadn’t indeed thought this very thing, her response to the query might have been slightly more…violent, shall we say.

Instead, she merely nodded once and said quite matter-of-factly, “Yes, I do. And I will never forgive you for it.”

All James could manage in response to this was a slowly-spreading grin and a bit of an excited bounce before he looked over her head across the room.

“Oy, Moony!” he called, “Did ya hear that?”

_Advanced Transfiguration_ was not removed from it’s position poised in front of Remus’ face as the boy answered.

“I heard nothing. I am not a part of this conversation. I will not be caught in the middle, and I will not be scraping your remains from the ceiling if you piss her off any more. I am not here. You cannot see me.”

A hand reached out from behind the book with these words, and the flowery curtain about his hospital bed was whisked closed quickly, the bottom fluttering a bit at the sudden movement before all was once again silent. Remus J. Lupin had been involved in far too many disputes in which he was the peacemaker, and as he had Charms with Miss Evans, and had seen what she could make a disobedient porcupine do as punishment for stabbing her with one of its quills, he decided that being the middle-man for any dispute in which she was on one side would be a definite check mark in the con column of his life.

Therefore, all that could be heard in the room was the water dripping slowly off the edge of Remus’ bedside table from when he’d grabbed his glass too quickly, and the faint tapping of Lily Evans’ right foot.

James took note of this. “You know,” he said, gesturing vaguely to her foot, “that’s a fairly good anger management technique right there. Foot tapping. Helps get rid of the nervous energy due to excessive frustration and the like. Not so bad on the joints as foot stomping, either.”

Lily’s right foot stopped tapping abruptly. James looked up.

“Oh no, don’t do that. Stopping that is bad because then your nervous energy due to excessive frustrations and the like will build up, and then I will be in very immediate danger.”

Lily stomped a foot. “You’re _already_ in very immediate danger, James, considering you have a _concussion_ , due to those very same anger management techniques, might I add, and which only serves to inhibit your already painstakingly slow brain processes.”

There was a snicker from behind the flowery curtains. James threw a pillow towards it and glared across the room as he addressed Lily’s insult.

“I might have a concussion, but I do seem to remember you being the one to smash the Bludger at my head.”

“It’s not my fault you let the damn thing loose, and you were the one too stupid to duck.”

“I might’ve been able to duck if you hadn’t _smiled_ at me.”

“Oh, so it’s _my_ fault because I _smiled_ at you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then I’ll be sure never to smile at you again.”

“Oh no, don’t do that.”

“Why not? It seems to cause all sorts of problems when I do.”

“But I like the problems.”

“You _like_ having a concussion?”

“If it means you’ll hang around, then yes.”

This last statement brought the silence from before back in full. Until, that is, Lily Evans voiced the very appropriate question, “…What?”

Every Statement has an equal and opposite Restatement.

“I said that if having a concussion means you hang around in the hospital wing with me, then no, I don’t mind at all.”

Those of you with sharp minds are now wondering, “But what about the ‘opposite’ bit of the restatement?” In explanation, I will only say that James Potter was always one to bend the rules just slightly, and he didn’t see any way of including an opposite restatement without causing further grievous injury to himself.

Given Lily’s recent revelation that she thought James a decent sort of fellow, she couldn’t bring herself to make any kind of biting remark. She actually, as amazing as it sounds, blushed a bit, and mumbled a quick ‘thank you’ before mentioning that she really had to get back to Gryffindor Tower, and she hoped he’d recover soon.

It was the first time they’d parted company with mutual civility.

Which, as a sidenote, Remus became very well aware of over the course of the next three hours, being that his friend simply would not shut up about it. In the end, he was forced to mention a rather odd thought he'd had about a lad stuck in Jell-O, and thereby effectively distracted James from his reflections on mutual civility, and set himself up for a session of rather interesting cleaning techniques in order to get his friend out of the blob of Jell-O which would fill a corner of the Great Hall in what was most likely the immediate future.

Now, given James’ recent head injury, he wasn’t quite able to make it to the next Hogsmeade weekend, which happened to be Valentine’s Day, which he’d always quite depised anyways what with the fluttering pink confetti and such, but he found that even the prospect of missing a chance to ask Lily on a date and be brutally denied wasn’t so bad when she turned up bearing chocolate on that very day, proclaiming lamely, that “she felt bad since it was her fault and all, so she’d brought a bit of Hogsmeade to him.”

It was the first time they’d spent a whole afternoon laughing and conversing normally, instead of screaming and arguing loudly.

But, as cliché as it sounds, it wasn’t the last.

It was a rainy afternoon in mid September when the final and most equal and opposite reaction to all the arguments and yelling matches that had taken place over the years occurred, and it was a day that would change the fates of both the Wizarding World and the Afterlife.

It was the day in which James Potter wondered of Miss Lily Evans if she would perhaps, “wanna get married?”

Her answer, as it were, was the epitome of an equal and opposite, and quite ironic, reaction.

“Well, you _are_ a decent sort of fellow, after all.”

It is the nature of The Three Laws to constantly be repeating themselves, and this answer not only provided for an equal and opposite reaction to the accumulation of negative answers given to James Potter by Lily Evans, but also an Action to start another Reaction.

Albeit, it was in a slightly different…world than the first.

“Albert! Albert, you sly old dog, get out from there, you buggering fool. Come here, come here this instant.”

The great Sir Isaac Newton was pounding in an overly excited manner on the front door of one Albert Einstein’s heavenly Laboratory. There were grumblings heard from within the door, before it was thrown open with utmost irritation, and the great Sir Isaac Newton was met with the sight of a rather small old man with extremely odd hair glaring out at him.

“Vat do you vant, Isaac? You must leave me alone, like I ask of you. Vhy can you not do zis?”

Newton stepped back from the man slightly and patted a hand to his head. “Albert, I don’t understand it. Every time I see you I tell you you must go to a different barber, and yet every time I come back, you still haven’t been. Why is that?”

Albert grabbed both tufts of gray hair poking out the sides of his head and pulled furiously. “Because you make me do zis, you fool, every time I see you!”

Newton ignored the man’s frustrated hair-pulling and instead pushed past him into his heavenly Laboratory.

“You owe me fifty Galleons,” he proclaimed as he picked up a vial of brightly colored liquid and examined it in the light.

“Do not touch zat,” Einstein said, grabbing the vial from him, “Get out of my heavenly Laboratory. I do not owe you fifty of zese Galleons. I do not know vat it is you speak of.”

“My dear man!” exclaimed Newton, “Do you not remember our wager?”

“Vat vager?”

“That Lily Evans and James Potter would finally fall in love due to _my_ Three Laws of Motion, of course!”

Einstein stared for a moment before finally shaking his head and turning away. “You are mistaken, dear sir. You do not vin zis vager. It vas _my_ law. It vas E equals MC squared. Everyzing is zese formula.”

And thus began the argument that would plague the entire heavenly Afterlife for decades to come. Dead people really have a whole lot of nothing to do, you see, and Isaac and Albert found that they could spend years straight walking about the Afterlife, simply arguing, and not tire of it. Especially since they were both scientists, scientists who had made their own laws, in fact, and that meant neither one had an ego that could stand to be bruised.

So it happened, that when so many years later Harry Potter finally defeated Tom Riddle, the spirit of the deceased evil warlord was sentenced to an eternity in the vicinity of the perpetually arguing Sir Isaac Newton and Doctor Albert Einstein.

As an equal and opposite reaction to this sentence, he went entirely insane within the first week, his ears fell off by the second, and by the third, he could no longer hear the words “Oh, but you are mistaken, dear sir,” without screaming in agony and begging for his filthy Muggle father.

And so, by writing this little story, which it did take me entirely longer than it should have, but such goes the way of life, I have endeavored to put an end to the petty argument by providing a comprehensive answer to that perpetually argued question, “Who knows best, Newton or Einstein?”

It has been a long road, and it has taken a long time, and it took long hours of thought, but if you’ll look at my title, you’ll see that I have discovered the answer.

_Newton_ does in fact know best, and that’s not just because his name sounds better with the rest of the title.

Really, he does. If you don’t believe me, you can ask Lily and James Potter, they’ll tell you. So will their son, as a matter of fact, being that his defeat of Lord Voldemort was a direct, equal, and opposite reaction to the fact that he sneezed when a bit of soot went up his nose.

The papers glorified the story, of course, but that really is entering upon a subject that has no place in this particular tale. What does have a place in this particular tale is, in fact, an ending, and being that I have no fourth law to end with, I shall have to conclude with this simple statement:

As a result of One Book in Motion, Accelerating at a Speed equal to it’s Velocity divided by it’s Mass, preventing two Objects Not in Motion from Snogging in the Stairwell, it produced a Reaction that was Equal and Opposite to the Original Action, in that it started a Chain of Events in response to a Previous Chain of Events in which there was much screaming and negative vibes emitted, that then resulted in One Final Equal and Opposite Reaction in which much snogging and affirmative vibes were emitted, which then recycled itself as another Action, and caused perpetual unrest in the Afterlife, insanity in an already psychotic warlord, and one completely round the bend story to come into existence and prove to the world that you do not know lunacy until you have been hit in the gut by a tree named Willamona who has a great-grandfather’s cousin’s niece’s daughter’s divorced husband’s best friend’s _previous_ financial advisor who is now a wand in a red-head named Lily’s possession.

In simplified, extremely condensed, comprehensible layman’s English terms, that means that, without an inkling of a doubt, Newton most definitely Knows Best.

And if you still doubt that, you simply have to go and ask Aberforth’s favorite goat about it. I’ll let him explain to you why, as I’m not entirely sure the reasons belong in a story underneath an M rating. Though I can’t be positive, since I’ve never asked.

Class dismissed.

**_A/N: And that, loo-hoos, is the very end. It took too long to get here, but I can honestly say that it was fun...and that I'm completly relieved it's finally over. I mean, really. The time this took was ridiculous. Address the hate mail to my Muses, please._ **

**_So, now I'm out for summer, and will therefore be working most ardently on Cheese Wheels. As soon as I get back from travelling, at least._ **

**_Thanks for reading, loo-hoos! Ya'll really are wonderful._ **

**_And review, why doncha? For old times' sake?_ **

**_:P -h_**


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